The Search for the Best Web Show: The Jerry Seinfeld Program

Web shows get no respect. Most of them don’t deserve any. But some are astounding. We’re gonna look for the best web show ever. First up:The Jerry Seinfeld Program.

Most of you will hate this show. It’s absurdist — not “absurd,” like “fun wacky hijinks”. This is some Samuel Beckett shit here. And it gets disturbing.

The Jerry Seinfeld Program is a deconstruction of Seinfeld, with just George and Jerry (played by Arthur Meyer and Dan Klein), always in Jerry’s apartment. In the first episode, George swears off beans:

If you hated that, you can quit now. Because this is the essence of The Jerry Seinfeld Program: Awkwardly waiting for the joke to end in a release, and realizing that nope, they’re just going to make you uncomfortable.

And that’s particularly genius with a Seinfeld parody. These guys are mocking an unassailable sitcom the only reasonable way: By exposing its rigid structure and reminding us that, even though its innovations changed comedy for the last two decades, it was still a very traditional show compared to the stuff we can see now on Adult Swim.